Just discovered that this account still existed.  :-)

On Fri, 29 Jun 2001, gabriel rosenkoetter wrote:

> Also, depending on how it's licensed and how you choose to interpret
> that license, it might be possible to use the Mach or LinuxPPC code
> as reference.

You can feel free to use anything MkLinux has to offer in this
regard.  Heck, LinuxPPC does on occasion.  :-p


> > 3) where can I find documentation on nubus? This one is tough...
> 
> See answer to 1.

You don't need any nubus info to use the 1400.  There's no nubus hardware
on the motherboard, AFAIK.  The display slot is PDS, IIRC, and everything
else is on the CPU bus.  I could be wrong about the display slot.  Either
way, unless you're trying to support one of those combo display/ethernet
cards on it, you don't need nubus info at all.

The hardest thing to bringing up NetBSD, Darwin, Mac OS X, whatever, on
these machines is getting a booter that will actually get you into a
kernel.  The second hardest thing to do is fix the kernel to allow you to
boot without a live open firmware.  A good place to start would be to make
it work while quiesced on a PCI machine.  :-)

After that, it would be relatively trivial to port to the PB1400.  Just
interrupt controller support and hacked probe/attach routines and
hard-coded addresses and interrupt numbers.


> > 4) Does netbsd currently have something like UMDOS, so that I can
> > install netbsd without trashing mac OS? I have no floppy drive on
> > this computer, only a network connection :(
> 
> What's UMDOS?

I think that was supposed to be UMSDOS, i.e. installing on top of an
existing partition w/o hosing it.


> The mac ROM has no text-based interface so far as I know, and
> there's no other controller kind of thing on nubus macs.

Right.  Rip from MkLinux.

Let me know if there's any info I can help with.


Later,
David